Chapter Twelve – The Great Thirst
The TSA officer did not like the looks of her boots when she got to the gate area. Talia dutifully sat on the floor and pulled them off, hopping barefooted through the scanner, and then collected her things and went to the boarding area.
The succession of flights and airports blurred after a few more hours. Talia finally got off the boat on the Greek island of Naxos and looked around the tiny dock for any familiar face. She didn’t know who to expect. She only knew a couple of the assistants they worked with at digs. Finally she saw a skinny Greek man holding up a sign that said, “Nata Tchatchki.”
“Hi,” she said, shouldering her bag and approaching the man. “I’m Nata.”
“No English,” the man said.
“I speak Greek,” she said in that language.
“Oh, good,” the man replied in the same tongue. He led her to a tiny Fiat and she tossed her bag in the back. They drove straight to a rambling building on a hillside overlooking the ocean. Well, truthfully, pretty much everything on Naxos overlooked the Aegean Sea in some direction.
The man let her out in front of the hospital. “Thanks,” Talia called out as he drove away. She was quickly directed to a tiny but clean room. Aunt Sophie clung to her with spidery arms, her gray hair wisping out of her bun and her thin face even more hollow than usual.
“Did you have a safe flight, dearest?”
“Yes, I’m fine. How is he?” Talia walked with her aunt to the bedside. Uncle Naddy lay motionless, his huge face pale beneath his thickly curling beard and mustache.
“He was stabbed. He lost a lot of blood, but the doctors say he’ll recover with rest. I’ve asked them to discharge him. They are reluctant, so I had to hire a private ambulance to transport him We have to get back to the base. Our artifacts were stolen, and all we have is the encrypted images. Those are vital clues, and we have to get them deciphered.”
“Stabbed? You only said he was hurt! What happened? Zanamu, who are these people? What do they want from you?”
“They want the testaments, of course, dearest. The enemy is always trying to rob us of the Word.”
Talia’s mind churned and she remembered her encounter with Dr. Ewing. Was this attack from people who would do anything to destroy the testaments, or from people who would do anything to keep them from being found? This didn't seem like the time to worry her aunt more so she didn't tell her about what had happened.
“But they can’t, Zanamu. I mean, how can they? There are millions of copies of the Scriptures, all languages, all over the world. They are online, in paper books, and on people’s electronic devices everywhere. And we have it in our hearts.”
“Do we?” Aunt Sophie’s eyes had never looked so sad. “How much do you have in your heart, my treasure? A hundred verses? A thousand? In how many languages? Can we teach it to so many people who never knew it, or have forgotten it, or have neglected it, when it’s too late?”
Uncle Naddy stirred and they both turned toward him. His eyes barely opened, and his words came out harsh and weak.
“Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord God, When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea And from the north even to the east; They will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, But they will not find it.”
Orderlies and a nurse entered the room, and things got busy transferring her uncle to a gurney.
“This is against medical advice,” said the nurse to Aunt Sophie. She nodded, tight-lipped. “You have to sign this form that you understand that, Mrs. – I mean – Doctor Ramin.”
Talia’s aunt scribbled on the clipboard she held out. “Thank you,” she said in a thin, scared voice. Aunt Sophie led Talia to a Land Rover where she saw Guglielmo and Cindee, the two assistants. Aunt Sophie got into the private ambulance in front, with Uncle Naddy.
Talia climbed into the back seat of the Rover. Guglielmo, whom she and Cindee had always called Jiggly, shook hands over the back of the front seat, and Cindee lunged over and hugged her.
“He is going to be okay, right?” Cindee whimpered as they followed the ambulance away from the hospital, Jiggly driving.
“Yes, Zanamu says yes. What happened?”
“Cindee and I were diving,” Jiggly began.
“Diving?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jiggly said. “Never mind, it was fun, and we found this undersea place like – I dunno, like those cave dwellings you told me about where the Indians lived, in the Great Canyon –”
“Grand Canyon,” Cindee corrected.
“Isn’t that what I said?” Jiggly asked. “Only underwater. We had a couple of certified divers with us, but Naddy wanted Cindee and me to supervise. He’s too fat and Sophie’s too skinny – they wouldn’t let either of them suit up, and you shoulda seen how purple Naddy’s face got. ‘That, Doctor Ramin,’ one of the diver guys said to Naddy, pointing at that big fat plum with a beard wrapped around it, ‘That is exactly why you cannot go down there with us’.”
“Anyway, so we went into four or five chambers and found some broken pottery,” Cindee interrupted. “Naddy wanted us to snap and bag everything. We had like sixty pounds of stuff and the divers were pointing up, making cut your throat signals, and I think maybe, ‘We’ll rip your hoses off if you don’t come up’ signals too, but Jiggly wanted to check one more room. We swam in, and saw this thing that looked like a leather bag, but it wasn’t rotten at all. It was pruny and stuff, but it was perfect. It had this gold chain threaded through grommets, and an ornate lock. We snapped and snapped until the divers grabbed us to haul us out, ’cause the air was almost gone. Jiggly grabbed the bag and hauled it along, and I tried to help him, but man, was it heavy, especially with all the other stuff. The divers kept signaling like they wanted us to leave it, but no way, once we saw that symbol under the coral we got chipped away from the lock.”
“What was it?” Talia demanded.
“The base is up ahead,” Jiggly responded maddeningly. “We can show you once we recover the data.”
“Recover the data?”
“Yeah, we ran to help when we saw those guys stab Naddy and push Sophie down. Seemed like they were more important at that moment in time.”
“Of course they were.”
“Anyway, we spent a few minutes getting Naddy’s wound tied up, and Cindee switched the satellite signal over from capture to send, and when we turned around, the two divers were gone, and so were the two guys who attacked Naddy and Sophie. The cameras and the artifacts was gone too. The divers had nothing to do with the thieves, according to the police. They just didn’t want to stick around and maybe get stabbed too. The leather bag and all the collection sacks are history.”
“No!” Talia almost screamed.
“Yeah,” Cindee moaned.
“So what did Zanamu mean, and what did you mean, that you have data, and that you can show me something, if the bags and the cameras are gone?”
“The satellite phone. It sends and receives,” Jiggly said with a fiendish grin in the rear view mirror, like he was a mad scientist about to apply voltage to something.
“It receives from our cameras,” Cindee said with a roll of her eyes. “The data’s backed up in the satellite phone, that Sophie kept safe and sound even when they roughed her up. They didn’t even think it was important enough to take.”
“Oh!” Talia breathed. They drove into a small city of tents. The ambulance pulled up near the largest one.
Workers had gathered around the main tent as the convoy approached. Two of them had brought a stretcher. They transferred Uncle Naddy onto it and carried him into the tent. The two hospital orderlies tossed the gurney back into the ambulance, slammed the doors, and drove away. Aunt Sophie jumped. Talia wrapped the tiny woman up in her arms.
“Come inside, Zanamu.” Talia pulled her into the tent and set her down on a camp stool Cindee had j
ust opened out. She joined Jiggly at a console Talia had never seen before. Cindee set the satellite phone in a cradle and they both started a frantic race of code-typing. Screens filled with lines of code and Talia’s eyes crossed before she gave up trying to follow it. Those two could run code like greyhounds and nobody could say who won these crazy races they ran.
“How did you get the money for this new equipment?” Talia asked.
“Your uncle won it, like he always does,” Aunt Sophie said. “Three weeks a year at Monte Carlo pays for every scrap of equipment we’ve ever had. You should know that by now.”
“The devil’s wages for the Lord’s work,” Uncle Naddy chuckled, deep and rough.
“Shhh,” Talia said, adjusting his blanket. “Don’t you have any warmer blankets?”
“Jiggly says my blubber will keep me warm, precious one. I am as comfortable as I can be with a puncture two inches from my lung. Have you got the images up yet, lazy wretches whose slovenly service it is my curse to endure?”
Jiggly muttered a few particularly potent Greek and Italian epithets.
Talia walked over and slapped the back of his head hard enough to rock him on his camp chair. “God hasn’t smitten you yet for your foul mouth, so I’ll do it for Him!”
“Do you hit your boyfriends when they don’t mind you, tchatchki?” sneered Jiggly. Talia knocked him to the floor.
“Please, Talia, beat him senseless later,” Uncle Naddy begged. “We need that data. I am sick of his ugly mouth as well.”
“I’ll kick your jaw loose if you speak again,” Talia warned Jiggly. “Get back up in the chair and help my uncle. And when you are done, get out of here.”
He got up and slunk back to his seat, starting up his frantic typing as if nothing had happened.
Slowly, agonizingly, images began to crawl up onto two of the screens. Uncle Naddy sat up with a grunt and a gasp. Neither Talia nor Aunt Sophie could hold him down. They all stared while Cindee and Jiggly rattled away, until a full sixty images crowded the displays. Talia walked over to them. “They are touch-screens!” She marveled.
“That one – third from the left, second from the bottom, on Cindee’s screen,” Uncle Naddy gurgled, holding his side.
“Oops, that’s my screen,” Jiggly said, cringing as if he thought Talia was going to strike him for speaking. “I crossed the wires, I guess, I was so excited to play with the new toys.”
Talia walked over beside him and manipulated the cables, then stared at the images. Most showed thick, silty water and piles of gray and brown potsherds. This one Uncle Naddy had pointed out showed the gold lock on the leather bag.
“It looks like bronze,” Talia mused. “High copper content. “Uncle Naddy … Could this be … ?”
“Yes, I think it’s orichalcum, my precious,” nodded uncle Naddy.
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t bother trying to blow the lock,” Jiggly sniggered.
“Magnify the image more, Talia,” Uncle Naddy requested. “More.”
Cindee said, “That’s it, Naddy. If we make it bigger, it’ll just distort. You can see what it is, though, can’t you?”
“I can’t believe what I see,” Uncle Naddy murmured. “Praise God. Praise God.”